The summer is winding down, the days are starting to grow shorter, and there’s a new chill in the air at night. It’s the perfect time to catch up on some older games ahead of the September onslaught that kicks off with Star Wars Outlaws’ launch next week.
It’s also a good time to make room for lesser-known releases that deserve more looks but aren’t always getting them in the glut of high-quality releases that are the monthly norm now. One of those is Dustborn, a gorgeous road-trip game about bandmates. Another is Arco, a pixel-art tactics RPG that’s easy to overlook but unlike anything else out there.
“This game is a masterpiece,” wrote Reddit user QubitsAndCheezits. “More important and impressive is that I’ve never played anything like it in ~40 years of gaming.” But even as a bunch of indie devs hit on the importance of venturing outside the same three genres that hit big on Steam, Arco co-creator Franek shared a brutal discovery.
“‘Make. New. Stuff.’ is fun advice until you have to sell your game without a target audience and you got rent to pay,” the developer tweeted. “We made something new. Our game has been well rated by critics and players but it sold badly.” There’s no magic formula for making a god game sell anymore, if ever there was, outside of maybe calling it Pokémon.
Day of the Devs lead curator Greg Rice made this point recently during July’s Brighton Develop keynote address. “Back in the day…If you had a really good art style, or maybe a really good game mechanic, maybe that was enough,” he said. “Now there are so many games out there, you have to excel across the board in most cases. [You need to have] a really beautiful art style that stands out from the crowd and is instantly recognizable, try to have mechanical gameplay hooks that are unique and different, and have a personality behind it that feels like it’s something coming from a place of creativity and passion.”
Surviving the modern gauntlet of Metacritic scores, Steam visibility, and ignorant online mobs also takes a lot of luck. So maybe take some time this weekend and play something that’s fun, fresh, and different. Here are six games we’re excited to play this weekend that chart a different path.